I have read Hussman and Schiff and Krugman and government stats and stuff cited by wendy at metar and so on and I do have concerns about the ramifications of our dependence on monetary stimulus to clean up a huge fiscal mess that we are not addressing elsewhere.

But none of that has much to do with the relative accuracy of the cpi inflation stats, of the 5-8% number cited by the OP, or the MIT number.

It seems to me that your post was about an interesting topic, but had little to do with the topic being discussed.